As is known, many companies track their physical assets (e.g., physical machines including, by way of example, servers) over the course of a fiscal year. However, such a tracking process can be time-consuming. To mitigate this issue, radio frequency identification (RFID) techniques have been employed. For example, in a data center scenario, each physical machine is typically equipped with an RFID tag. When the tracking process begins, personnel use RFID readers to scan and identify all the physical machines in the data center via the RFID tags.
However, more and more companies have adopted the approach of having nearly no physical assets, and rather have turned to the new information technology (IT) computing model known as cloud computing. With the prevalence of cloud computing, small companies can rent resources (e.g., computing, storage, network) from cloud providers to build their business services. Moreover, companies prefer renting virtual machines from so-called Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers as a basic computing container due to its flexibility. Then, those companies will not possess physical assets (e.g., servers) but rather they will utilize virtual assets such as virtual machines. However, a company's ability to know that it is getting what it is paying for with regard to virtual machines that it rents from a cloud provider has proven to be a problem in existing data centers.